


forget your perfect offering

by thevoiceoflightcity



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dr Nyarlathotep, Gen, also there doesn't seem to be any concise way to convey this but cass isn't my oc specifically, badly defined temporal unpleasantness, failure to meet deadlines (that's on my part), fight me etc., oh and the dr whos nb and ace
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 21:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14881232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevoiceoflightcity/pseuds/thevoiceoflightcity
Summary: The Doctor offers her a brief, blinding smile, like old fluorescent light, flickering brittle and off-colour and far too bright.  “Higher-dimensional distortion event,” they explain, meaninglessly. “A bit. Loud. That’s all. But shouldn’t be destructive, not on this side of the warp, and Torchwood has—sensors, they’re rudimentary still but it’s not like a warp of this calibre is particularly subtle, they’ll know,” they say, talking more to themself than to her. They raise their head, looking at something, she suspects, that no one else sees. “Fragmented? No, that wouldn’t—”And then their eyes widen, something like shock flashing across their face, too fast to properly identify. “Something fell through.”





	forget your perfect offering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cosmickaiju](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmickaiju/gifts).



> see above re: a very specific version of tentoo's story and character, possibly incomprehensible, you're welcome to try it anyway. 
> 
> also: future lightcity of six months later returns to note that the second chapter is in endless limbo and i'm really sorry about it, but it does mostly exist and will hopefully kick in eventually

“Hmm?” says Jackie, eloquently.

“Your go,” Tony informs her, seriously. He’s holding his cards out straight in front of him, keeping them spread-out with the diligent, concentrated care that only small children trying very hard to emulate their favourite grown-ups ever achieve; the Doctor, next to them, is holding their cards with somewhat more finesse but not much more maturity. Neither of them, Jackie notes fondly, have combed their hair. Both of them are looking at her expectantly.

She takes a moment to try and remember which game they’re playing, squints at her cards uncertainly. “…Right. Er. Tony, d’you… have any fives?”

It’s evening at the Tyler Mansion, not yet quite dark; it’ll be Tony’s bedtime soon, although God knows how she’ll disentangle him from the Doctor—or disentangle the Doctor from him, for that matter, the Doctor’s lovely but they don’t really understand the fact that children need _sleep_. Or even really that anyone does, come to think of it. (Which is fair enough, she supposes, given that _they_ don’t seem to, at least not that you’d notice.)

Evening, and Rose and Cass aren’t home yet. She tries not to let it worry her—with half the family working for a self-professed secret organization, they don’t exactly keep normal working hours. (The Doctor’s been here all day, for one thing.) They’ll be out on some operation that secrecy demands they don’t tell her the details of, that’s all. Pete is absent too, which might mean he’s involved in the same mission or might just mean he’s forgotten the time and worked too long again, he never remembers to look at the clock, the walnut.

In the meantime it’s just her and Tony and the Doctor. Which the latter two are about equally endlessly delighted by. The Doctor may technically be nine hundred years old, or whatever number they’re currently claiming, but sometimes it’s hard to believe they’re any older than ten, the way they act. She’s half started thinking of them as another one of her children. Cass, too, but then Cass is about five minutes and a ring away from being Cass Tyler anyway, so it’s different. For one thing, she’s _sensible._

The Doctor, not terribly. That much Jackie’s pretty sure everyone agrees on.

Case in point: they’ve spent all afternoon teaching Tony card games. As well as, she’s beginning to suspect, how to cheat at them. Oh well. If nothing else, her son’ll do well at casinos someday.

“Go _fish,_ ” Tony announces grandly. “Doctor, twos!”

“Well, look at that,” the Doctor says, with great gravity, “you’ve caught me out,” and produces a two of diamonds out of their sleeve (unless you look too closely, in which case it’s closer to out of thin air, but Jacke’s sort of learned to ignore that kind of thing.) Well, they all have. It’s a bit of a necessary skill for living in close proximity with an ambiguously extradimensional alien. The Doctor flips it up into the air, and Tony crows in delight—

and then the card drops straight past their outstretched hand and hits the floor with an unremarkable clatter. Which is enough to make even Jackie sit up straight.

The Doctor’s staring into absolutely nothing at all, eyes blank, frozen in a way that’s too complete, too alien, for anything human to achieve—like pressing the pause button on a videotape, complete with that slight fizzing distortion, edges blurring into the air, and she knows enough to know that’s _bad,_ that is very very bad indeed. For a single wild meaningless moment she contemplates trying to grab Tony and run, trying to figure how fast she could get out of the room with him slung over her shoulder, how fast she could call Rose, if she could just clobber them over the head with a chair and if they’re still _together_ enough for something like that to affect them—

At which point reality jerks, and stutters, and suddenly seems to settle back into alignment, and they’re back in motion with nothing more physically implausible than a few relatively inconspicuous flickers of sourceless light. They’re moving more or less like a human being when they scramble back, chair skittering away across the hardwood floor, stand bolt upright and _waver—_ as if they might just topple backwards and be still, something like disorientation on their face, and under it the desperate concentration of a being trying not to fall apart. “Sorry! Sorry,” the words jumbled together, and they shake their head, blink once, repeat it, cleaner. “Sorry. Ah—Tony, here’s your two,” they say numbly, hand over the card without quite looking at anything—Jackie stares after it doubtfully, decides it’s probably better to ignore the fact that they definitely never bent over to pick it up. Tony studies it only a little suspiciously before dutifully slotting it into his hand.

“Doctor…?” she settles on, eventually.

They fumble blindly for the chair somewhere behind them, pull it back in to the table with unsteady hands, eyes flat blank green and dead as glass. “I—yes. Fine! It’s fine, I’m alright, really, only—a surprise, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. Sorry.” They run a hand through their hair—they look human again, now, or as human as they ever get, shaken but not much worse than shaken. They _could_ be okay. Jackie doesn’t trust it even a little bit. “Just a surprise.”

Her brows knit. “What sort of surprise?” A moment and she clarifies, nervy, somehow not wanting to risk the silence, as if she’s afraid of what might fill it. “I mean—something me and Tony prob’ly wouldn’t know is happening at all, right?”

They offer her a brief, blinding smile, like old fluorescent light, flickering brittle and off-colour and far too bright. It’s a shaky terrible thing and she might not know them like Rose does but she doesn’t like it at _all_. “Higher-dimensional distortion event,” they explain, meaninglessly. “A bit. Loud. That’s all. But shouldn’t be destructive, not on this side of the warp, and anyway that sort of thing isn’t so much my problem anymore, is it, so it hardly matters. Probably the Time Agency, one way or another. Rose knows—”

“Rose can kill _any monster,_ ” Tony opines, as his contribution to the conversation, glowing with six-year-old bravado and burgeoning hero-worship. “She’s the best there is, of all time.” This is then followed by several helpful sound effects, mostly to the tune of ‘blam blam whoosh.’

“Torchwood has—the sensors, they’re rudimentary still but it’s not like a warp of this calibre is particularly _subtle_ , they’ll know,” the Doctor says, mumbling more to themself than to her. They raise their head, a bizarre not-quite-normal motion that looks almost like they’re tasting the wind—like the next moment they’re going to start running, predator-graceful and single-minded with instinct, like they’re on the _hunt._ Looking at something, she suspects, that no one else sees. “Fragmented? No, that wouldn’t—”

And then their eyes widen, something like shock flashing across their face, too fast to properly identify. “Something fell through.”

There’s a long moment in which no one says anything all.

And then Tony pops up in front of them, standing on his chair with slightly wobbly determination, and regards the Doctor critically, and says “Have you got any _more_ twos.”

“Ah,” says the Doctor, automatically. “No. Sorry. Go fish.”

And then: “Jackie? Where did you put the communicator?”

 

The call for them to report to Torchwood comes in twenty-odd minutes later (twenty-four minutes, fifty-seven seconds, point one three nine, they’re still Time Lord enough for _that._ ) They’re halfway there by then, and moving fast.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worrying.

For one: the fact that _they_ sent a message first, registered their intent to return to base, and that the call came anyway; it means either someone was sloppy, or someone didn’t have enough time. Either way, it implies urgency. Not that they didn’t know that already.

And then there’s the fact that they’re being called in at _all._ That one’s complicated.

Not for the first time, they lament this Torchwood’s inability to discuss anything meaningful over the phone—they understand that it’s an op-sec problem, that the only truly impenetrable firewall is an air gap, and it’s only reasonable for the People’s Republic to be wary of communications technology, with Cybus only a scant few years gone, but they remember all too well life where communication wasn’t merely instantaneous but quite literally took no time at all. Not that that’s by any measure what they miss most about the TARDIS, not that that even _registers,_ and that’s—

not something they’re thinking about any time soon.

Point being: until they finally make it through every scanner and security gauntlet into the heart of what at some point picked up the name of Torchwood Nought, thirty-one agonizingly long minutes after they first see the worldline flare, there’s no one to ask, no way for them to _know._ They could demand answers but there’d be little point and anyway it’s not that far gone, can’t be that far gone, even if the aftershocks still jitter nerveless and disjointed up and down their spine.

They trust Torchwood. They trust Rose. Even if it’s what they suspect, even if it’s time-active technology, because of course there’s always flotsam and jetsam on a wave like this and some of it is very very old _indeed,_ and they know what these warps are descendant of—

_Something fell through._

No. It’s possible, nothing else, they can’t pull themself apart over a possibility. It’s not like they couldn’t deal with it. The finesse sometimes escapes them, these days, and there are angles of reality that they’ll never see again, and the spiral centre is one of them—but by any other metric they have raw power aplenty and destruction would still be easy, always is.

It’s not like they haven’t seen temporal turbulence before.

A warp event like this one is _nothing_ , on a cosmic scale. Like throwing a pebble into the Rhine—there are ripples, there are always going to be ripples, but that’s all the trace it’ll ever leave, certainly it won’t do any _damage._ Disorienting, this close to the epicentre, to watch time twist in on itself, but events like it haven’t been uncommon, since the War began, since the War ended. Time heals like any other living thing, the worldline melting back into patchwork shape, but where there’s a knot or a block or a fixed-point too solidly anchored the tension can build up, and when it snaps the shock travels, that’s all. They’ve seen it before.

(Not with this body. Not with these eyes. Not as this jigsaw-puzzle tangle of a thing, half of themself missing, still immersed in Time without the right systems left behind to block out the noise of it, staring into the supernova with no way to look away—)

They don’t think it. They think of nothing at all. It’s not what matters.

What matters is this: _this_ particular warp-event did leave a solid trace behind.

Not a scar, as such, because whatever it is it’s autonomous; a knot of _wrongness_ in the fabric of everything, but an independent one. A consequence, rather than a symptom. And a warp-event isn’t destructive from _this_ side. This is where the tension bleeds out; the breaking point, a thousand light-years and a million miles away, is very very different indeed.

Something came through: an artefact, an impossibility, duller now as the ripples spread out and are dragged away by the river-tide, and then they type the last passcode into the last security door (usually it’d work by palmprint, except their body temperature confuses the reader so much as to render it entirely useless) and they are through.

 

Rose sends for the Doctor as soon as she can, using the doubtful authority everyone ceaselessly assumes she has as top active agent and Pete Tyler’s daughter for once—protocol might require her to call some sort of meeting first, to work out what level of clearance is necessary to consult on a thing like this, but she hardly cares. She doesn’t know enough to fix this. _None_ of them do. She knows only just enough to understand that the Doctor is the only one who has a chance, and that they need to be here _fast._

Still, she wasn’t expecting them to be _this_ fast. To crash in ten minutes after she’d sent the message, when it takes ten minutes just to get through all the security checks to here. She should have probably known better.

She spins on pure instinct from where she’d been staring at the flat silver of the Zero Room door, tracing the carefully etched TEMPORAL QUARANTINE [EXPERIMENTAL] over and over again, only narrowly avoids slipping into combat-readiness—still running on too much adrenaline. And then she recognizes them, and the sheer relief is followed very quickly by open-mouthed confusion.

“How did you—” she begins, but they haven’t stopped moving—they’ve gone sharp around the edges, she notes with some alarm, too clear and too bright, the kind of razor-blade _real_ they only get when they’re trying to hard not to lose hold. The confusion morphs, abruptly, into concern. “ _Doctor!_ ”

And then they’ve taken up her hands in theirs, staring straight at her, except somehow she doesn’t think they’re seeing her, and the fear sparks—are they alright, should she not have called, should they not be here—and Cass is still debriefing, she was dealing with the reports while Rose kept watch, but the Doctor wasn’t supposed to show up yet. Instinctively she tries to tug out of their grip and finds suddenly that she can’t, that they don’t even shift—

—and then something clicks and they _breathe,_ the angles and edges of them suddenly a little less desperate-sharp, tension melting out of them suddenly they almost sway in place, hands flickering around to hover around the edges of her face instead. Their voice is soft, and it splinters, sick with relief. “No. You’re alright. That’s good, you—just the normal distortion and you’ve still got the Inner Time immunity still, you’ll be fine.”

“What?” says Rose, thoroughly confused.                     

The Doctor steps back too suddenly, something discomfited flashing across their face, dragging their hands back to themself. “I—sorry.”

“No, that’s fine,” she says automatically, and then “Hang on, they told you about the warp already?”

“—No.” They make a vague gesture, eyes flickering away to stare at the Zero Room door instead. “I saw it happen. Hard to miss, this close-range.”

Oh. Hell. Time-sensitivity—she could have _guessed,_ she knew they saw things about a thousand times more precisely than the rudimentary sensors they’d helped Torchwood build, and half of those sensors had just blown out in the wake of _this._ No wonder they’ve gone strange around the edges.

“Was it your idea,” they ask abruptly, “putting it here?”

“In the Zero Room? We thought—if it’s temporal quarantine it might help stabilize, at least a bit—”

“Good idea,” they say distantly, “not that it’s close enough to a real Zero Room to really hold it, if it blew—”

“Doctor,” she manages to get in, “ _Doctor,”_ until they look at her, eyes wide, bright green guttering like a candle-flame in wind. “Are you alright?”

“Fine,” they say, which she does not believe even a little bit. “No—” they start, and then they really do soften, take a breath, let it out, look away. “Stable,” they settle on, eventually and this time their eyes when they glance back at her are at least mostly steady. “Better, once I can be sure whatever’s in there won’t flux-collapse and take most of local reality with it. I’m not—” There’s half a wince there, and then they push past it. “I’m not used to dealing with distortion like, like this, it’s not—comfortable, but we _can’t_ wait for it to fade, Rose, I need to see it now, you know that.”

“…Okay,” she says finally, “yeah, that’s fair. But Doctor—be _careful._ ”

“Brilliant.” They flash her a smile that’s too bright around the edges but what isn’t, these days; she figures they’re as okay as they’re going to get, in this situation. It worries her some—even half-human they can walk straight through stuff that would destroy anybody else in this universe, not just the mundane stuff like complaining that arsenic tastes like burnt tea and walking through firestorms without getting so much as scorched but also weirder things, like the fact that gravity doesn’t really seem affect them unless they specifically remember to let it do so, like—time things, that they won’t talk about and nobody else in the universe would know.

Except that part of her’s afraid that if it goes one way, it must go the other. That someday Torchwood’s going to find something, some virus or weapon or stranger thing, that will _only_ affect Time Lords; that whatever finally defeats them won’t even enter any plane of reality she can see.

And then something they’ve said catches up with her. “Hang on, take most of local reality with it?”

They’ve already entered in the codes for the airlock—not that it’s actually an airlock, she couldn’t follow the physics explanations for the life of her, apparently even the scientists specially brought in barely understood enough to build the thing—quick enough that she has to hurry to step in after them before the doors of closed.

“Well, there’s no telling, is the problem,” they say absently, “what a warp like that will kick up out all the dark alcoves and the graves, what an artefact like that could do—it could be a weapon, even,” and their voice does something funny on _weapon_ , except that she suddenly can’t worry about it.

There’s the usual jolt, entering the Zero Room; all she gets is a bizarre moment of disassociation and a weird, dead silence, but she’s close enough know to see the Doctor shiver, fuzzing out and re-focusing across the transition, shaking their head like they’re trying to get water out of their ears. She’s numb with shock, with realization, with dawning fear. “ _Artefact?_ Doctor—”

“Whatever you want to call it, then,” they say, “chronal driftwood, it could look like anything—”

“No,” she says, and then again, but they’re already opening the door, repeats it, “No, Doctor, wait, _don’t—_ ”

Too late.

They take one step out before they begin to turn to her, mild, puzzled. She’s standing close enough that she can feel the exact moment they freeze.

She nearly panics. She does panic, clutches their hand tight like it means anything, delirious with horror. Their voice is soft and terrible and it warps the air. “No.”

Nobody told them. Oh, how could she have been _stupid,_ she shouldn’t have assumed, they came so fast; there was chance for anyone to have told them, half the chain of command didn’t even know yet, all they knew was that _something_ had landed and she should have known, should have known, should have known.

She follows their gaze to the end of the room. There’s a table there and zie’s laid out on it, or at least she thinks zie is; if anything, zie’s gotten even harder to look at directly since she carried zie in here, and she was the only one who could really tell zie was there at all, she thought it was the TARDIS’s legacy again, the rudimentary protection having once been in a timeship gives her, and maybe she wasn’t even wrong—

“Artefact,” she whispers, miserably, “Doctor, not an _artefact,_ it was a crashed ship, didn’t you—”

It’s the indistinct shape of a person humming on the table, not particularly humanoid but a person nonetheless, except that the air splinters around zem, except that zie’s different every time she blinks and never quite real to begin with, and there’s nothing so much as the impression of a _wound:_ the air bloody and terrible, whining in impossible pain, like slivers of ice in her spine. The impression of something torn apart.  

“—a _person._ ”

“No,” the Doctor repeats, very calmly.

The next moment she doesn’t understand at all.

They move in every direction at once; they lose coherency entirely, as suddenly as she’s ever seen, dissolve into an infinite sourceless storm of broken glass and darkness, jagged and stuttering, they surge forward and they melt back and they blow away from top to bottom like a sand-sculpture in wind and she thinks she sees them tear in two but at the same time she sees nothing at all, nothing, nothing again nothing. The whine in the air snaps like wire and morphs into a cut-glass shriek that tears through everything—

and then there’s nothing, for real this time, there’s no transition period, no space left for dread, one moment they are the cracks between stars and then they’re entirely incarnate again, condensed more tightly than she thinks she has ever seen them. She stares at them blankly as they stagger, paler than death, and go down like a sack of bricks.

For a moment she can’t think anything at all. It’s more than just the barely-there glint and glitter of them when they’re trying to stay together; it’s like they’ve become so real they’ve gone straight through the other side, like there is nothing left of them but sharp edges, glowing almost too bright to look at. Too much concentrated into too physical a form, too much power held too tight, like in the next moment they’ll burn up, like _she’d_ burn if she touched them, and every part of it shrieks and grinds with fundamental terrible instability barely, barely held-back.

“ _Rose,_ ” they say, and she reacts without thinking; falls down beside them, clutches at their hand for all that it feels like holding lightning made tangible, and then again, their voice just as much in her head as out of it, “Rose—”

“What do you need,” she hears, and then repeats it, only realizing now how the terror rips into her. “What do you _need,_ Doctor?”

“Out,” their voice crackling with desperation, more than literally. “Out, I’ll pull her _apart,_ Rose, _please—_ ”

And that’s all she need; some dumb, mindless part of her takes over, hoists them up, noticing distantly that they’re lighter than she would have thought, drags them into the airlock, punches the buttons with numb fingers, blind with light. The Doctor curls up on the floor and trembles like they’re going to fly apart, and there’s nothing she can do but slide down against the wall and pretend closing her eyes blocks out the brightness and wait.

 

The next thing she hears is “Holy _fuck._ ”

She recognizes it without recognition; reaches for it by pure instinct, wanting anything safe, anything _certain,_ anything steady. Just wanting—

—and then Cass lifts her up and says “Rose _,”_ and her eyes snap open, still full of nonsense afterimages. She makes an indistinct meaningless noise and clings.

Cass doesn’t waver, keeps hold, even as her voice shudders. “Rose? Can you talk to me?”

“Oh, God,” is all Rose can muster, an ecstasy of dread. “Oh, _Hell—_ ” There’s still that hum in the air, there’s other people at the edges of the room—the rest of the team, back from debriefing, that makes sense—there’s still that hum.

“The Doctor’s,” Cass starts, which is all it takes.

She’s upright in the next second, wheeling around, finds them immediately—could have found them without looking at all, the way they are right now. Still too concentrated to be stable, like a star on the edge of becoming a black hole, but she has no intention of letting them go that far. They’re curled up against the airlock door, what’s left of their eyes blank as mirrors; she lets herself crumple over in front of them, spits out “ _Come back._ ”

No response. “Doctor,” she says, “I got you _out,_ you have to stop, you can stop, come back.”

No response. She reaches for their hand—

and gets nothing less than terror; they slam backwards against the wall, as far away from her as they can get, and she rocks back— “Okay, it’s okay, I won’t touch you, I promise I—”

“Rose,” Cass says, very clearly.

“I have to—” she fires back, only half-coherently.

“You promised,” Cass reminds her, hand careful on her shoulder. “Not when they’re like this.” Her voice hardens, stays even. “They’re not your responsibility, Rose, you don’t let them burn you up.”

Which is true. She did promise. She shuts her eyes and shuffles backwards.

She hears Cass take a breath, and then say, very firmly, “Doctor, you’re hurting us. Let go _._ ”  

There’s a whirl of meaninglessness; something rushes past her into the infinite distance and something cracks and something comes back together and the next thing she hears is the Doctor’s voice, splintered but at least still there, and what they’re saying is “ _I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t._ ”

“Hush,” Cass says, and then softer, “hush, it’s _okay,_ Doctor, nothing happened, you just need to breathe, that’s all. I swear to fuck, you’re fine.”

They lapse into shuddering silence. Rose blinks her eyes open; they’ve curled up properly now, long legs up to their chest, forehead against their knees. They stutter and they glitch and they’re not even close to human, but it’s something she can deal with, at least it feels like a balance.

“Now, seriously,” Cass continues, after a moment, her voice cracking very slightly this time. “What the shit even.”

“I—” Rose manages, shakes her head, blinking the last light out of her eyes.

“You did go into the Zero Room, right,” Cass adds, “this didn’t just happen for no particular reason.”

“—yeah. I. I was _stupid,_ ” she forces out, “I didn’t say it was a _person,_ they knew something was there but they didn’t realize that it was some _body_. They just—I don’t know why.”

“Right.” A pause. “Doctor?”

“I can’t go back in there.” Their head snaps up, words coming too fast, eyes infinite and shatter-sharp. “I _can’t_ —her timeline’s on the verge of collapse, one moment longer even out here and she’d have—erased, entirely—”

“So zie’s in trouble?”

The Doctor makes a torn-off, desperate noise. “She’s _dying!_ Worse than—” and then a liquid barrage of syllables that slip on the air and _catch,_ the world juddering around them— “—you don’t know how to _describe_ what it’ll do to her, her timeline will eat its own tail, she’ll never have lived and she’ll never have died and she never _will_ die!”

“And we don’t have any way to help her.”

They nearly snarl. “Not _you._

Cass blinks. “I don’t know what that means.”

“I could.” They crumple, somehow, fundamentally. Voice dropping to a whisper. “I could have, I—a Time Lord could.”

This one Rose knows the answer to, inhales too sharp. “You mean, you could have, before the metacrisis.”

“It’s so—easy—” and they make some kind of motion with their hands, exactingly meaningless, words slow and delirious with despair. “A warp like that isn’t more paradoxical than any other kind of time travel, it’s just unprotected, her biodata’s hooked on a thousand different points in timespace between here and there, all it would take is to—smooth it out, calm the flux, tie her back into _this_ worldline.” Their voice climbs, cracks. “ _Have_ to tie her back. Leaving her hanging, impossible, never-won’t-have-unhappened, it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, worse than any fixed point, it shouldn’t happen—"

Rose takes a breath. “Why can’t you?”

“I _tried!_ ” they say, with unexpected force. “You _saw—_ I was halfway there to trying and it—it would have broken her, any little bit of instability and she’d fall apart all the way—”

Which is when they choke.

“Instability,” Rose repeats, and knows.

“I’m a thousand times more impossible than she ever could be,” they recite dully. “I shouldn’t _exist._ I shouldn’t ever have existed. Except I don’t _die._ I’m—forget the Web of Time, all I _have_ are sharp edges, it was—if I so much as _touched_ her the wrong way, she’d be gone.”

So they pulled all those sharp edges inwards instead. The opposite of unfurling: curling up as tight as they can, just to make some reasonable pretence of stability. She can’t imagine what that would take.

She can’t imagine what it would feel like.

She’d thought they were burning up: now she pictures the light as knives instead, and feels kind of sick.

“Okay,” Cass ends up on, after a long moment. “First things first: that’s not your fault.”

“It never is,” the Doctor rasps, bitter and ancient. What they don’t say is _what does it matter? What does it change? What_ good _does that do?_

“It still matters,” Cass says, with a certain amount of fierceness. “It still matters, because secondly, you can’t help what you can’t control, and you don’t deserve to feel like shit over it. If there’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing you can do. Then we take her out of—limbo, if I’m getting this it, and we let her go, and she’ll die, and we’ll have done what we _could._ At the very least, she won’t die alone.”

There’s a pause.

“Thirdly,” she continues, and there’s a note of near-uncertainty. “If you can’t—touch her, if you can’t do it the way a Time Lord should, is there anything you can do— _without_ touching her?”

The Doctor stares at her, still pale as death, green eyes wide and blank. “I.”

“We have—if we can help,” she says, “we might not have a timeship but there’s still those vortex manipulators we nicked off the Time Agency, you know what Torchwood has lying around, if there’s anything that could help—if there’s anything we could _try._ ”

They curl in on themself, the humming darkness in the air twisting tight around the small miserable form of them. “I—what if I can’t, as soon as don’t stay balanced, she’s—”

“If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work,” Cass says, “and that’s not your _fault,_ and you can—leave the Room again if you have to—she’s dying anyway, you said it yourself, even if we just give her a _chance._ ”

“What if I can’t,” they repeat, again, meaningless with despair.

“Then you can’t,” Rose says softly, and this time when she reaches for their hand they don’t pull away, fingers curling tight and trembling around hers. “But if you can _try._ ” They look at her, finally, properly look at her, and their eyes are a million years old but that’s alright. “I won’t let go, I promise, Doctor, it’s okay.”

“I can,” they say, eventually, and then they make a funny noise that’s nearly a laugh. “Oh, Menti Celesti—there is something.”

**Author's Note:**

>  _ring them bells that still can ring_  
>  _forget your perfect offering_  
>  _there is a crack, a crack in everything_  
>  _that’s how the light gets in_  
>  \- leonard cohen, ‘anthem’


End file.
